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Bucket open tickets by age and exclude pending-customer ones
- For Customer support teams
- You practice Catching mistakes and made-up facts
- Time about 5 minutes
- Level Intermediate
About this exercise
Count the open tickets by age in exactly four lines: "0-1 days:", "2-3 days:", "4+ days:" and "Excluded:". Each of the first three gives a number. Leave out tickets waiting on the customer and say how many in Excluded. Count carefully. Plain text, under 30 words.
Common mistakes when you ask AI for this
- Counting the pending ticket. The director's draft includes T13 in 4+ days. Try: Say: "Leave out tickets waiting on the customer; report them under Excluded."
- Miscounting the buckets. The AI estimates counts from a list. Try: Say: "Count each ticket once by age."
- Wrong layout. The AI writes a table or paragraph. Try: Name the four labels.
- Getting markdown back. AI adds bold and headings by default, which show up as stray symbols where this is pasted. Try: Say "plain text, no bold, no headings, no asterisks".
- Trusting the AI to count words. AI is bad at counting and usually runs long, so a vague "keep it short" lands well over the limit. Try: Cap each part instead of the total, for example "each line under 15 words".
What a strong prompt includes
- Asks for plain text
- Sets a length limit
- Names the labels
- Excludes pending
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